What is known about the now-150-year-old flag begins at a garage sale in Columbus, Neb., in 1965. That was where Charles Lowry found the old Red Ensign in the hands of an American veteran.“It was an old flag and he was just going to throw it away,” says Charles’s son Mike Lowry. “And Dad said: `What’s the story with the flag?”’
This particular flag, whose age has been confirmed by the Royal Canadian Legion, dates back to the period between 1870 and 1873, after Manitoba joined Confederation but before British Columbia.The American veteran didn’t know any of this at the time. What he did know was what the German soldier told him: That the flag had been taken off one of the 916 Canadian soldiers who died three years earlier during the ill-fated raid at Dieppe.
“The German claimed he wasn’t involved in the fighting but was just with a burial detail, and found it on a dead Canadian and basically took it as a souvenir,” Mike says. “They took it away from him, needless to say, and the plan was to give it to some Canadian unit.” He eventually confirmed its Canadian heritage, at which point he reached out to the Canadian Embassy in Washington, D.C. But after a lukewarm response, he contacted the Royal Canadian Legion about five years ago, which was eager to take it.
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